Sam Byrne

Samuel Byrne (1883–1978) was an Australian self-taught folk painter from Broken Hill, New South Wales. A former miner and unionist, he turned to painting in old age and became known for his depictions of civic life in his home town, working life on its mines, as well as events and historical anecdotes. His works are characterised by detail, vivid colours, and a narrative focus often imbued with humour. Byrne emerged from the fringes of an outback mining city and rose to prominence and recognition within Australia's national arts establishment. Despite a late start in life, Byrne managed to build a reputation as one of Australia's “most prolific” and “most celebrated” naïve artists. His works are held by state galleries and the National Gallery of Australia, and have been recognised by commentators as both examples of Australian self-taught art and as records of the mining and folk history of Broken Hill.

Leonard French, who discovered Byrne and spent some time trying to understand his motivations for painting, remarked that he had never met anyone of “such an absolute innocence”. Art historian Jenny Zimmer described Byrne as an “extroverted eccentric of a particular type, peculiar to Australia”. In his older years, Byrne was described by Broken Hill historian R. H. B. Kearns as lively and sharp-witted, with a "whimsical sense of humour" and a deep reserve of reminiscences - traits that informed both his public persona and his reputation as a "raconteur in paint".

Biography Early life

Sam Byrne was born Michael Eldrige Samuel on 10 July 1883 in Humbug Scrub, South Australia, the second child of James and Elizabeth Burns. When Byrne was two, the family moved to the mining town of Thackaringa, west of Broken Hill.

He attended primary school in Thackaringa before his father died in 1890 from a blacksmithing accident. With no widow’s pension available, his mother moved the family to Broken Hill to work as a washerwoman, but died soon after from pneumonia. Byrne was then raised by two aunts and attended school until he was old enough to work on the mines.

As a child, Byrne supplemented the family income by selling The Barrier Miner, collecting bottles, Byrne's memories and childhood fascination with the rabbit plagues, and the townsfolk's unusual methods of dealing with them, would become a recurring theme of his paintings later in life.

Mining Career

Sam Byrne began working at the BHP lead-silver mine in Broken Hill at the young age of fifteen, using his deceased brother's union card to register. The work exposed him to occupational risks such as dust disease, smoke, underground fires, lead poisoning and cave-ins, the latter of which caused the death of some of his colleagues.

A strike procession during the 1909 Broken Hill Lockout. Sam Byrne played in the union brass band which marched the pickets to the mine boundary, where they would keep guard for strikebreakers.

Byrne described himself as a socialist, They captured the attention of communist writer Leonard Fox, who interviewed Byrne for the mining union publication Common Cause, where Byrne reflected on the harsh conditions and criticised the mining companies' attitude that the lives of their workers were expendable.

Before the First World War, Byrne suffered a severe arm injury in mining machinery, prompting him to retrain as a surface engine driver. He retired in 1949 at age 66. Over the next few years, the couple had four sons, one died in infancy. Likewise, he did not serve in the Second World War as mining was classed as a protected industry. Byrne's family were relatively insulated from the economic downturn of the Great Depression due to maintaining employment in his specialised trade as an engine driver. He secured scholarships to send his three sons to a teacher's college; adamant that they should avoid the dangerous work on the mines.

In his retirement, aside from painting, Byrne was an enthusiastic member of the Old Age Pensioners' Association, the Broken Hill Historical Society, and the Barrier Field Naturalists' Society. He was a keen fossicker and an amateur inventor. One of the more unusual inventions he worked on was a bicycle that could paddle on water, for which he dug out and flooded a large trench in his backyard. He did not drive a car, and relied upon a bicycle for transport throughout his life. His later life transformation from a miner to an artist has been cited by some as a model for a fulfilling retirement.

Career as a painter Byrne began painting in the early 1950s, inspired by sketches he had made of Broken Hill and its surrounds on excursions with the Barrier Field Naturalists' Society. He had no commercial aspirations, and explained that he only wanted something nice to hang on the walls at home. According to Betty Churcher, at first Byrne had “absolutely no interest in other artists, nor in any tradition in art”. He then introduced Byrne to local artist May Harding, who encouraged him to pursue his distinctive self-taught style and assisted him in adopting professional materials and techniques.

In 1960 Melbourne artist Leonard French awarded Byrne first prize in the annual Broken Hill Art Competition for his panorama The Silver City. Impressed, French offered to introduce him to Sydney gallery director Rudy Komon, though at first he wrestled with the ethical dilemma of whether to expose Byrne to the judgement of the commercial art world.

Through the 1960s Byrne held several solo exhibitions, though arthritis and fatigue later led him to give them up. He would make personal appearances at the openings, where he acted as an unofficial ambassador for his home city of Broken Hill, explaining with pride the folk stories behind his paintings.

He exhibited primarily through the Rudy Komon Gallery but also worked with other commercial galleries, and demand for his work grew steadily. His paintings entered institutional and corporate collections in Australia and overseas, and there were often personal commissions. Byrne also sold paintings directly from his Wolfram Street home, and his wife Florence proved to be a capable and shrewd sales manager.

Byrne was a founding member of the Willyama Arts Society and contributed to local arts policy. In 1976 the mayor of Broken Hill formally recognised Byrne’s services to art in a ceremony and exhibition at the Civic Centre. Despite his friendship with Brushmen of the Bush members Pro Hart and Hugh Schultz, Byrne was never invited to join the group, a fact that limited his visibility among visiting tourists.

In his final years Byrne focussed mainly on his line of lode series, depicting Broken Hill’s central mining operations as he remembered it from his youth. With these works he won acquisitive prizes in Broken Hill (1976) and Swan Hill (1977). Another was a finalist in the Wynne Prize and was purchased by BHP for its Melbourne offices. His 1978 painting Broken Hill Line of Lode 1893 proved to be the final work he exhibited before his death. The series as a whole was described by biographer Ross Moore as an “epic vision” to immortalise Broken Hill at its prime, and translate his childhood experience of the industrial landscape into mythology. His palette was strong and vibrant, dominated by bright reds, yellow ochres, and chalky blue skies filled with stylised clouds. Over the two decades he painted, his output can be divided into three stylistic phases, shaped by both his declining eyesight and his commercial activities.

Early panoramas (1950s–early 1960s)

Byrne’s earliest works were large panoramas of the Broken Hill township. Their style was cartographic, used traditional perspective and emphasised accuracy and detail. Distant houses and trees were rendered through a technique similar to pointillism, described by Geoffrey Lehmann as "miniaturisation" and likened to a colony of coral polyps. and art critic Alan McCulloch noted the patience and craftsmanship they required.

Commercial phase (mid-1960s–mid 1970s)

Following his discovery by Leonard French and his first exhibitions, Byrne turned to subjects that reflected both his own memories of historical outback life and the demand from collectors and tourists. Mining scenes, dust storms, rabbit plagues, Sturt's desert peas, and union strikes became recurring themes. Byrne would usually paint his “puppet-like” Byrne often used impasto, viewed by John Olsen as a stylistic choice, but which was also explained as the result of his tendency to overpaint until he was satisfied with the outcome. During this time, Byrne began to use textural collages of galena dust as a literal representation of the mineral in his mining scenes. He obtained the pulverised ore from friends who still worked on the Broken Hill mines, and sprinkled it into the wet paint.

During this commercial period, Byrne made and painted his own frames from salvaged wood, and attempted to imitate professional jobs. Although the resulting frames were crude, they have been described as artful constructions that complement to the paintings’ appeal as folk art. Final years (mid-1970s–1978)

In Byrne’s final years his glaucoma brought changes in both technique and style. While he continued to produce the popular subjects buyers expected, the compositions became less controlled, with irregularities in form. Vertical lines were difficult to maintain, so figures often appeared to lean forward. He relied on the help of his neighbour Les Bell to distinguish and order his colours.

Artistic evaluation

Byrne has been classified variously by arts commentators as a naïve, a primitive, The terminology and nuance has changed over time, but all reflect his lack of formal training and his origins outside of the mainstream art world. Byrne himself was aware of the terminology arts commentators used about him, but did not understand nor identify with them. Despite this, French’s advocacy helped bring Byrne to wider attention. He admired Byrne’s “confidence of ignorance” to overcome pictorial problems that would daunt trained realists, and described his style as idiosyncratic, comparable to that of European naïve painters such as Rousseau and Vivin – though he stressed that Byrne was on a “lower level of accomplishment”. These did not escape the scrutiny of some critics, with Nancy Borlase regarding them as "regrettably, the amateur paintings of a tourist".

Byrne's later works were affected by his glaucoma, which many collectors marked as a point of deterioration in his art. Sasha Grishin wrote that there was a decline in quality, nature. Both author Geoffrey Lehmann and arts broadcaster Brian Adams described Byrne's compositions in this period as being crude in individual elements, but generating an overall effect of great energy. and his paintings of these were used as supporting material in the South Australian Museum’s exhibition Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland (2007).

There has been institutional interest in Byrne’s paintings of rabbit plagues, a subject not often documented visually in Australian history. His work Hungry Rabbits Thackaringa 1890 was adapted into a panel for the Great Hall Embroidery (1988) which hangs at Parliament House, Canberra. Rabbit Plague Round-up into Old Mine featured in the National Gallery of Australia's centenary exhibition Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901–2001, which explored national identity through art. More recently, the State Library of New South Wales acquired Rabbit Plague Raking Up Rabbits Broken Hill 1893, in line with its mandate to preserve materials that document the history and culture of the state.

Historian and public intellectual Humphrey McQueen cited Sam Byrne's paintings as a model of how an authentic Australian arts culture can emerge from the grassroots of suburbia. He wrote that they offered a counterpoint to the Australian tendency to appropriate Aboriginal mythologies or to imitate overseas fashions.

Arts literature

Byrne is included in the standard references McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art (2006), Australian Watercolour Painters (1989), and the World Encyclopedia of Naive Art (1984). He appeared in three ABC Television documentaries,

Collections

Works by Sam Byrne are held in the permanent collections of:

National Gallery of Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery of South Australia State Library of New South Wales Queensland Art Gallery National Gallery of Victoria Australian Parliament House Heide Museum of Modern Art Newcastle Art Gallery Mildura Arts Centre Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery Broken Hill City Art Gallery La Trobe University Dunmoochin Foundation.

Selected works

External links to selected works The Silver City (1957) Broken Hill City Art Gallery Thackaringa 1888 (1963) Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery Frog Marching Rioters 1909 Broken Hill (1963) Broken Hill City Art Gallery North Mine (c1963) Broken Hill City Art Gallery Arrest of Tom Mann 1909 Lockout Riot Broken Hill (c1965) Broken Hill City Art Gallery Fall of Ground Early Days Broken Hill (c1965) Broken Hill City Art Gallery Turks Fire on Picnic Train Broken Hill Jan 1st 1915 (1965) National Gallery of Victoria Dust Storm Approaching Broken Hill (c1966) Heide Museum of Modern Art Prayer's and Curses Moslem's Pray Bullocky Curse's (sic)(c1969) National Gallery of Victoria Thackaringa 1890 (c1970) National Gallery of Australia Cecelia Resists Police – Unusual Transport Early Days Broken Hill (c1972) Broken Hill City Art Gallery BHP Mine and Viaduct 1890 (1976) Broken Hill City Art Gallery